Scandals are Interchangeable

One of Girard’s conversation partners (Jean-Michel Oughourlian) says that it “is obvious that bringing to light the founding murder completely rules out any compromise with the principle of sacrifice” (Reader, p. 179). Well, no. Our task here is to point to some of the reasons why Girard falls into this either/or trap.

“That is indeed why people are constrained to invent an irrational requirement of sacrifice that absolves them of responsibility. According to this argument, the Father of Jesus is still a God of violence, despite what Jesus explicitly says” (Reader, p. 186).

Girard sees a great deal in the text, and, if it is in the text, we have a responsibility to see it also. But in places like this, Girard over-reaches. He stumbles when he contrasts the misunderstanding of most Christians over against what Jesus “explicitly says.” On the contrary, evangelical Christians believe in penal substitution because of what Scriptures explicitly say. Elsewhere Girard dismisses this kind of thing as remnant of the old sacrificial order—even the writers of Scripture have to scrape mud off their boots. But this won’t do either; we have no authority to pick and choose. God tells us what He wants us to know. It is our responsibility to accept it all, harmonizing it as we can, and accepting all of it whether or not we can.

From Genesis to Revelation, it is plain that God demands and receives true sacrifice. The Israelites put blood on the lintels of their doorways in the first Passover in order to protect themselves from the angel of the Lord—not from the Egyptians. The Passover lamb was a substitute for each first born son in the nation of Israel. And Christ is our Passover lamb.

But clearly, Girard is no dope. How does he come to make this mistake? Why does he contrast the way of sacrifice with the way of non-sacrifice? Why does he make it the most basic of all choices? There are two reasons. The first is that he accepts the doctrine of evolution. The second is that he does not understand how Calvinism explains the world, and in particular how it explains the relationship of God to the world.

He wants to say that the revelation of the sacrificial mechanism puts an end to all sacrifice. We want to say that the ultimate and final sacrifice reveals all unbelieving forms of the sacrificial mechanism for what they are, and puts an end to all need for sacrifice, both in form and substance. This is because Christ is the propitiation for our sins (1 John 2:1-2).

“When Jesus says: ‘Your will be done and not mine,’ it is really a question of dying. But it is not a question of showing obedience to an incomprehensible demand for sacrifice” (Reader, p. 187).

First, as a theistic evolutionist, Girard sees the human race struggling up out of a bestial past, trying desperately to get a handle on the violence that tore our communities apart. In this light, he sees the sacrificial mechanism as a great advance—a hard deal with our bloodthirsty nature that greatly mitigates the problem. But this doesn’t work at all if God created us male and female, and we rebelled against Him in the Garden, and we expelled. The first bloodshed was not Cain killing Abel; it was God killing the animals to make clothes for Adam and Eve.

His evolutionism is related to the second problem. If the world is just sort of evolving, God is off to the side, laboring and working with it, trying to whip it into shape. But if God simply spoke, creatio ex nihilo, and blam, there it was, the picture changes. It means that a Creator God cannot absolve Himself of any responsibility for the violence in the world. At the end of the equation this is nicknamed Calvinism, but really it is simply the doctrine of creation and providence.

Notice how Girard sees it though.

“A nonviolent deity can signal his existence to mankind only by becoming driven out by violence—by demonstrating that he is not able to remain in the Kingdom of Violence. But this very demonstration is found to remain ambiguous for a long time, and it is not capable of achieving a decisive result, since it looks like total impotence to those who live under the regime of violence” (Reader, p. 193).

The only response I can really come up with here is “poor baby.” How did such a non-violent god every get saddled with such a violent world? The only possible biblical answer is that this violent world is here because God made it. It continues on its violent way because God lets it. But God cannot play the part of Pontius Pilate, and wash His hands of it.

If God is seen as being part of “all that is,” then He and we are all swimming around in the great ocean of being—He as a whale and us as minnows. This means that for the whale to act on the minnows necessitates violence. But if God is the Creator God, and there is a Creator/creature divide, then this means that authoritative action across the divide is no more violent than it was violence on the part of Shakespeare to write Macbeth. We are not being evasive if we decline to do the math on this—we cannot. I can illustrate the Creator/creature divide on the blackboard, but I cannot do the physics involved and show my work. If I could do that, I wouldn’t be on this side of that divide.

As creationists, and as Calvinists, we can appropriate Girard’s central insights. The pagan mechanism of sacrifice is exactly what Girard says it is. Mimetic envy makes the world go round. The scapegoat mechanism is undeniable. But the God of the Bible says that “vengeance is mine,” not that “vengeance is bad.”

Just a few comments on Satan. Girard is right to identify Satan with scandal and accusation. He is also right to affirm that Satan is a reality. He goes astray when he denies that Satan is a personal being. Again, it is not a matter of either/or. The spirit of accusation and slander that arises from the human race, like fog off the river, does not create a “spiritual force” called the devil or Satan. Satan, a fallen angel, is driven by all the same forces that we fallen humans are, and he is the master of manipulating them. The relationship between devils and men is therefore symbiotic. We need each other, and have both been adept in managing this marriage of convenience. All the insight that Girard offers about this does not require that Satan be thought of as nothing more than a potent personification.

A few final comments on how scandal works. One of the things that has been baffling (at first glance) in the controversies swirling around Moscow over the last few years has been the fact that adversaries and enemies can become friends as the result of scandal. We have seen this play out over and over again. Murphy leaves the church because he is unhappy with Smith. A little while later, Smith leaves because he is unhappy with Jones, whereupon Murphy and Smith become fast friends. A few years ago I nicknamed this the “fellowship of the grievance.” It was quite striking. Recently (as in, just this last week), we have seen conservative Presbyterians (FV critics) teaming up with our local Intoleristas. Let Girard explain it.

“We feel this way because, as a rule, we are scandalized. Jesus is not and he feels differently. He knows that scandals are mimetic from the start and they become more so as they are exacerbated. They become more and more impersonal, anonymous, undifferentiated, and therefore interchangeable. Beyond a certain threshold of exasperation, scandals will substitute for one another, with no awareness on our part” (Reader, p. 199).

Scandals are interchangeable. There you have it.